This is a verbatim transcription of citizen comments by Mr. Bill Haven and commissioners Bruce Adams, Rebecca Benally, and Phil Lyman during the September 4, 2018 San Juan County Commission meeting.

The audio can be heard here. Comments begin at 12 minutes 45 seconds

https://www.utah.gov/pmn/files/424507.MP3

Bill Haven: Bill Haven, President of the Blanding Travel Council (BATC) and owner of Abajo Haven Guest Cabins. I wanted to make a comment and give the commissioners a letter on this controversial monument advertising campaign. When that came up, we wrote a letter of support to the Utah Office of Tourism Board of Directors and I wanted to give you guys what unanimously the BATC passed in support of it. I also wanted to voice our opinion, we had put in for kind of the same marketing grant in 2016 and we did receive acceptance of that grant. But we never…. It was a regional marketing plan that we had put in for matching grant funds, and we went in with the county and the city of Monticello and Blanding and we all matched, we asked for your support on that and then it was matched and we did receive the grant, but we never used that grant because of the situation at that time with the Bears Ears National Monument. We re-met as a group and said maybe it’s not appropriate right now, with what the county’s doing and the citizens of the county, with regards to the monument – no decision had been made on it. But this recent marketing grant is basically what we wanted to do but even more because the budget’s so much bigger on it. I think our tourism businesses – and I’m only talking for the Blanding area, I’m not talking for the county – is really in need of a marketing strategy and plan. And when this plan was brought up to us, it was a very detailed, very well written, strategically focused marketing plan. As good as any one I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately with the name, there are some people that that still rubs a raw emotion.

But the fact of the matter is, we have national monuments in this county. The whole idea that we wanted to do in our marketing plan, and this marketing plan also sees the same thing, if we could get people to stay an extra day or two in the county, it’s dramatic how much more money they spend. And the marketing people we are going after are not partiers, you know, the spring break group, people jumping off cliffs. We’re targeting families that are upper to middle income, retired people and upper middle income who like outdoor recreation. And I think they’re good people to have in this area to recreate. And you have to give them something in their trip itinerary to say ‘why would I stay there more than one day.’

Well? The National Monuments! You’ve got, all of them we know, and unfortunately Bears Ears is one of them. But Natural Bridges and Hovenweep, and originally when we were thinking of a monumental ad campaign, those are the monuments we were thinking of, we were not thinking of Bears Ears. But Bears Ears is a fact and I think the commissioners and the citizens in this county did a fantastic job of redirecting how that monument ended up coming out.

But I think now as a business trying to promote the area and trying to just fill the rooms, I mean we’re still at the point in our tourism of just still trying to fill the rooms, and I think we need that as a marketing plan to kind of help us focus on who are we and what do we have to offer for you. So that was my only point. And I don’t know where this will end up and I really hope this marketing plan does go ahead and go through because I think it’s really well organized and written and all the businesses I have talked to were very excited about it and were very disappointed when we weren’t able to do ours.

Phil Lyman: We’ve got two monuments. We’ve got the monument that was designated by President Obama which was a front, it was a bully, it was non-consensual, the process was completely wrong and that’s still what I think sticks in a lot of people’s minds. Even though we could say we had a huge victory in getting that monument reduced and getting some input into what should have been done in the first place. So I don’t know if there’s a way locally, maybe we need more local PR as to what it is that we’re promoting vs that we’re not still upset about it.

Haven: That’s a good point.

Phil: The BATC does a great job, and Natalie’s fantastic. Maybe we need to get more of an open house on some of these marketing campaigns, get these comments out in advance and sell people on the idea so we don’t get an emotional reaction to it.

Haven: That’s a good point, and one thing I think has been a little concerning to me is after the settlement of what the monument ended up, there have been a lot of energy and negative energy put towards tourism, and businesses in tourism, and we’re all aware of the two articles that came out about Natalie that were totally unfounded, and didn’t even have the decency to go talk to her before they wrote the articles and said “how did this happen?” And there’s just been a lot of people I talk to, and looking at different posts, there’s a lot of confusion on what the TRT tax is. A lot of people think it’s coming out of the general fund.

There’s a lot of confusion on how big our tourism business is, it isn’t that big. And when you have a 14% drop in the restaurant tax, that isn’t becoming Moab tomorrow. I think that has concerned me as business owner of this constant, every time we mention tourism, well we’re gonna become Moab tomorrow. That turns a lot of people against. I know most everyone in the tourism business in this county, I never heard one person say ‘my goal is to turn into Moab’. I’ve never heard that discussed, I never heard a plan for that, I’ve never heard local businesses, and these are local businesses owned by local people, some of them the foundation of this county from the start. And they’ve been run over the coals for the last year. One person said tourism jobs are like parasites. We’re not parasites, I mean good heavens!

There’s a lot of people that work in the tourism business and cleaning rooms was never meant to be a career, it’s a way to make some extra money, and most people that do it say ‘great! I made some extra money! Good job!’ So don’t want the discussion to go that way, us against them.

Phil: That’s hitting the nail on the head. We really don’t want the discussion to go that way, and when you throw the ‘monumental’ tagline…. It’s like, could we, and we’ve said this, could we delay that, at least until some of the wounds have healed and some of the lawsuits are done because it’s still such a symbolic point of division, and if you’re not for the monument, well you must be anti-government, you must be anti-tourism, and that’s not the case either. So you come in to what could be a good discussion, and good marketing campaign, and as soon as you say “Make it Monumental”, now you’ve divided a group that ought to be coordinated and pushing in the same direction. And I don’t know how you necessarily get around it…

Haven: It’s hard!

Phil:…or that you can get around it, but the ‘monumental’ tagline, sponsored by the county… Now if a business wants to go out and say come to Bears Ears, that’s one thing, but for the county to use ‘monumental’ as their tagline, just to me, introduces some politics… it would be better if we could come up with a tagline that didn’t do that.

Haven: Well could you rename it?

Phil: Yeah. Yeah, we’ve talked about that.

Haven: That’s fine… I mean, I’m not talking for everybody. It’s the marketing plan itself is what we don’t want to lose.

Phil: We watched the videos and they were outstanding. They weren’t promoting the monument, they were just promoting the county and that’s what we want to do.

Rebecca Benally: Well after reading the email that you sent and looking at it holistically, I think since the monument came, it’s awakened the giant so-to-speak. It’s been asleep for decades and decades and because people weren’t informed, no transparency, or it wasn’t put out into the light, it has been marketed all these years, but it’s just that, recently when we restructured the Economic Development Department, because there’s transparency, the citizens now know what’s in process. What are some of the long-term goals, what are some of the long-term planning as far as economic development? One of them is tourism. We were an extractive county, so I think it’s just a matter of symantics, and yes there are emotions tied to it. But I think the problem here is that there wasn’t transparency before. [She goes on and on about how it was marketed all along, and we’ve had monuments …..she eventually talks about all the truckers that come through town and how we need more 24/7 stores….and talking about having a balance in the county]

Haven: I agree with you, and I think with this marketing plan we can change the name, which isn’t that big an issue actually, to me. But the plan itself is exactly, having all of us in the tourism business for a number of years, we have seen where do we have a weakness, or we have a weakness defining ‘why would I come rather than driving through?’ Some of the businesses have done some marketing on their own and has success with it, but when you’re a tourist doing your itinerary, it’s like, why would I go to San Juan County and spend a couple of days. The BATC hooked up with Natural Bridges. That was our first, because in the county, it was not being marketed. You wouldn’t have even know Natural Bridges was in the county with the county marketing plan. So the central part of the county, we really started focusing on Hovenweep, Natural Bridges, and the Needles District. So we had something in the central part of the county that people would say “ah, I’ll take an extra day and do that”. We have had good success with that, but we have such a small budget and I think that’s fine. I would rather actually have the county take the lead in that, than us taking the lead in that. But the county finally has come up, in the 11 years that I’ve been involved with this, this is the first marketing plan the county has come up with – before then they didn’t even make a marketing plan – but it addresses that problem.

And we, in the BATC, really tried to work on the regional market, more than the international market. Because Utah does that. I mean, they have an endless budget. They go all over the world promoting Utah. They don’t do a lot of promotion, they do some but they don’t do a whole lot in this region and we have Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Las Vegas within a days’ drive of here. So that’s what we, our little marketing plan addressed six years ago, and we’ve had a steady increase in growth. We were going negative before we started that. We were minus in our TRT growth. But the county put together, Natalie and Allison put together a great marketing plan. I mean that’s exactly who we need to target. If we need to change the name, or we need to change the symantics of it, or whatever we need to do, let’s do it! I just don’t want to see the marketing plan thrown out and not done for another couple of years. Because we really have businesses that are tetering on making it or not and we’ve had a lot of restaurants close in the last two years.

Rebecca: Yeah and I think the other problem in this situation was the media reporting without found facts and information. That’s the other problem.

Haven: That’s awful!

Bruce Adams: Are you declaring fake news? *laugh*

Rebecca: It’s always fake news with the media.

Haven: Well I won’t take up any more of your time. I just wanna make sure, you know, to consider… don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we need to change, there could be a real good discussion on that. If you wanna title it something else, I think we could have a real productive discussion on that.

Phil: I think also, I can’t speak for the other commissioners, but economic development is probably job 1 for us, but we depend on people who are in the tourism industry to figure out what should be done in the tourism industry. We’ve never wanted to micromanage the department itself, we just want to be in the loop, and as Commissioner Benally said, we feel like now we are in the loop and this one kind of snuck up on us with the tagline but the campaign we’re 100% behind. That grant application was a huge win for Natalie’s office and we’re proud of her for what she did on it. We want to see our tourism businesses thriving and flourishing.

Haven: Again, everyone I know in the tourism business doesn’t want the only economic development in this county to be tourism. They realize that’s not healthy. But I would like to see other groups with economic development put as much time and energy into it as we have, and go pursue your dreams! I mean go and organize this and promote and whatever it is, do it!

In the second decade of the 21st Century, Abbey Lives.

He lives in his books. He lives on YouTube and on Facebook. His fans adore him, or who they think he is. But is this the world and the West that he cherished and loved?  Is the New West compatible with his vision of wilderness and wide open spaces?

In Desert Solitaire, Abbey offered a unique reason for establishing wilderness. “We may need wilderness someday,” he proposed, “not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. He warned that “technology adds a new dimension to the process,” and believed (then) that the wilderness would provide escape from those kinds of Big Brother controls.  For Abbey, wilderness was meant to be the one vast “blank spot on the map,” as Aldo Leopold longed for.

He also wrote, “A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it.”

In 2018, he would not recognize the  wilderness he sought to protect (though in his journals, in 1987, he had already complained, “Too many tourists in the backcountry now.”)

Environmental groups, once dedicated to saving the wilderness that Abbey envisioned, now look at wilderness as a commodity to be marketed. What is the economic value of wilderness? Environmentalists promote the notion of a swarming tourist economy. They’ve taken a favorite Abbey line: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense; it needs more defenders,” and turned it into a Chamber of Commerce promo….the more money that can be made from the product, the greater the chance, in their estimation, of passing wilderness legislation. Nevermind what gets destroyed in the process.

Even grassroots groups, who once worked for the protection of the land and the satisfaction that they were honest participants in “the good fight,” now parse their battle cries and make a $100K a year. Their boards of directors are filled with wealthy fat cat industrialists that would have had Abbey deported if they could have found a way. Together, they support a massive recreation/amenities economy that brings millions of tourists to the once remote rural West and with it, untold quantities of money and environmental devastation.

Adrenaline junkies from the far corners of the planet descend on the canyon country to string slacklines, and rock climb and ride bikes off cliffs and BASE jump and ‘do’ the river..

Abbey used to talk about “a loveliness and quiet exultation.” Nowadays exultation makes a lot of noise.

When Abbey talked about seeking wilderness, he admonished us, “to walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.”  When he talked about riding bicycles, he imagined them as a replacement for cars, not feet. He did not envision luxury “adventure tours” and hand-held guided hikes to “remote locations,” barely a mile from their cars.

Abbey wrote, “We don’t go into the wilderness to exhibit our skills at gourmet cooking. We go into the wilderness to get away from the kind of people who think gourmet cooking is important.”

And he didn’t envision a wilderness experience that included cell phones, smart phones, GPS units, or daily uploads to Facebook (“Here’s what our sunset looked like tonight! Here in the WILDERNESS!” —–126 ‘LIKES’)

Yet, many of these recreationists convince themselves  they are the latter day disciples of a man they know practically nothing about, or bother to know.

About a year ago, an essay appeared in High Country News called, “What Would Edward Abbey Do?” The author and a group of friends had come across a huge boulder, perched on the rim of a mountain valley. Michael Branch felt an urge to knock the rock from its resting place and send it flying from its rim-side perch to the tranquil scene below. It was an absurd notion and the damage it would cause was incalculable. But one member of the group spoke up.

“Whenever I am uncertain,” replied Francois in a thick French accent so utterly authentic that it sounded hilariously fake, “I abide by this principle: WWEAD.” When he had finished pronouncing each letter with meticulous emphasis, the three of us looked at him quizzically. “What would Edward Abbey do?” he explained coolly.

(The link: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/rants-from-the-hill-what-would-edward-abbey-do)

What would Edward Abbey do? Based on that rhetorical question and, I guess,  the vague recollection that Abbey claimed he rolled something into the Grand Canyon—an old tire—more than 50 years ago, the guys decided it was a good idea. Branch exclaimed, “I was Sisyphus unbound, and I had a Frenchman’s love of Cactus Ed to thank for it.”

I doubt Abbey would have felt comfortable being an accomplice from the grave, but he shouldn’t have felt responsible either for their vandalism. Clearly, they’d learned nothing at all from Cactus Ed.

What Abbey always hoped we’d take away from his writing and from his life was a sense of ourselves as individuals, as men and women who could take control of our own lives and our own destinies. Abbey spoke of a “nation of bleeting sheep and braying jackasses.” He longed for a people with dignity and courage and he loathed the mindless “bleeting” that he found even in his own readers.

He once said, “ If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule. That was the American Dream.”  Most New Westerners love Ed Abbey and have no idea what that means. They’ve read all his books and they follow and “LIKE” his quotes on Facebook, but they understand far less than they realize.

Recently, I saw a string of comments about Abbey on the Facebook page devoted to his life.

A debate broke out of sorts—another one of those tedious comment threads— as to whether Abbey would have liked the internet. One man was sure he’d have nothing to do with it; another wrote, “He would have found much to admire in the expression of democracy it affords.”  That was a fair point.

What Ed would have loathed is the idea that his most loyal fans might spend their days in front of a laptop computer, week after week, clicking the “like” button each time one of his EA crowd-pleaser quotes got posted, when they could be outside, chopping down a billboard or taking a good long walk, or just watching a nice sunset.

Abbey may have hoped, when he left this world, that his time and effort here might make a small difference, might alter the future for the better in some way. But probably not. More than likely, he saw all this coming, just as he predicted so much that has already, sadly, come to pass.

But whether the world really does go to hell or not, or whether it’s already there, for godsake remember who Ed Abbey was. Who he REALLY was. And don’t just sit there, staring at your screen.

As Cactus Ed pleaded, “Throw a rock at something big and glassy..what have you got to lose?”

Jim Stiles is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr.

Excerpt:

MOAB — Suspended 400 feet over the stark beauty of a Moab canyon, California couple Ryan Jenks and Kimberly Weglin tied the knot and said “I do.”

The adventurous couple fell in love surrounded by the red rocks of the Utah desert and thought it only proper to seal the deal in the same place after getting engaged on a space net in Moab the year before, according to their wedding photographer’s Instagram post.

To read more, click HERE